Page 85 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

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Chinese trade in the second half of the prime role in either the consumption or
eighteenth century, while the Americans were the production of them and other kinds of export
biggest commercial players in the nineteenth- art.” 106 In the informative Étude pratique du
century China trade, comprised principally of commerce d’exportation de la Chine, written by
tea, silk and porcelain. Witness notes by four representatives of the French trade mission
contemporaries suggest that this trade was in China in the years 1845-1846, a number of
invariably accompanied by the purchase of pages are devoted to the various sorts of export
Chinese export paintings. Large numbers of paintings and the prices applicable at that time
paintings were taken back to the West after their for the export of watercolours and gouaches on
sea voyages. The numbers were so great that the paper and on pith paper, oil paintings on canvas
84 imperial customs officials felt it necessary to and reverse glass paintings to Europe and
allocate paintings of this sort a serial number of America. 107 It is known that all artists asked
their own on export documents. 104 According to roughly the same prices, which were regulated
Clark, Chinese export paintings can be according to the dimensions of the canvas or the
considered, in particular, as media in the visual paper and the number of sheets. 108
trade culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth Does the flourishing Chinese export market
centuries: “These paintings are ‘just’ commercial reveal anything about the local Dutch and
paintings, produced by commercial artists.” 105 international art markets in the nineteenth
It is possible to think like this, but I would like century? It certainly contrasts with the
to emphasise that Clark’s statement does not seventeenth century, when paintings travelled in
imply that these paintings are less valuable. a reverse direction from Holland to the East and
In terms of export duties, oil paintings were to the West. At that time, ships full of oil
taxed individually and the watercolours and paintings left Amsterdam for markets within and
gouaches on (pith) paper per bundle of one outside Europe. 109 However, no one uses the
hundred. Although by the end of the eighteenth term ‘Dutch export painting’ for these artworks,
century export paintings could be commissioned or even those made especially for the market
to order or bought in Canton, Kaufmann argues both at home and abroad. Is Chinese export
that it is “difficult to ascribe to the Dutch a painting (hardly intended for the local market)

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104 Williams 1856, 134-135. Article number 39 in the table of tax tariffs for Chinese export articles. Oil paintings
per piece, watercolours per hundred pieces: ‘Chinese Duties: 010; Duties in Spanish currency: 0.14; Exchange of
Duties in sycee: 0.15 ½; Duties per cwt. of lb. in English currency: 0.06; Duties per 100 kilograms: 0.76’. These
amounts conform to the tariff applicable in 1843. Cuadrado 1983, 125.
105 Personal communication, John Clark, 11 September 2007.
106 Kaufmann 2014, 219. Van Campen 2005, 18-41. Many of the produced Chinese export art goods found Dutch
clients, but they were not made exclusively for Dutch clients.
107 Rondot 1849, 175-178. Oil paintings were available to buy in various price classes. Depending on the size and
the kind of frame and whether the master painter himself or one of his pupils had made the painting, the prices in
the 1840s ranged from five piastres (meagerly executed with a frame of yellowish wood) to ten (students of Youqua
and Tingqua) and thirty (small Lamqua portraits) piastres. Foreigners had to pay two piasters and 75 cents to three
piasters for a silk brocade covered album with twelve sheets of watercolours on pith paper. The same album with
figures painted more elaborately cost four piastres; the albums with professions and street scenes, high dignitaries
and mandarins in colourful costumes and executed in very fine details were sold for seven piastres per album. From
remaining inventories of ships' cargoes (Amiot & Cibot (1786, 365-366, quoted in Van Dongen 2001 (e-pub)) we
know that in Canton, circa 1785, the average price for reverse glass paintings varied between eight and twelve
dollars. ‘Dollars’ here refers to the Spanish-Mexican silver coinage from the period around 1800. At that time, these
coins were the most important medium of payment in trade with the Chinese. According to the Étude pratique du
commerce d’exportion de la China, in the 1840s these paintings, depending on their format, cost between one and
five piastres per piece. A piastre is a unit of currency. At that time, one piastre equalled 5.48 French francs. The
calculation of purchases and expenses also employed other monetary units from East and South-East Asia, such as
the catty and the tael. A catty was a measure of weight used in connection with precious metals. It corresponds to
circa 625 grams of silver. Each catty represented a value of sixteen taels. Every 1000 piastres were equivalent to 720
taels. In the historical China trade period, a tael was worth approximately 1,35 dollars.
108 Thomson 1873, vol. 1., 1982, n.p.
109 See the research project at the Amsterdam Centre for the Study of the Golden Age of the University of
Amsterdam: Artistic and economic competition in the Amsterdam art market c. 1630-1690: History painting in
Amsterdam in Rembrandt’s time (Sluijter 2009; Bok 2008).